Two pre-war Japanese telegram cipher tables are presented in a blog (痩田肥利太衛門残日録その二). They are simple substitution ciphers for kana from 1923 and 1938 and are for internal use by the staff of Sendai Communication Office (serving both as a post office and a telegraph office).
The example message in the illustration of the blog is a famous double-reading message in Japanese.
The message:
kaneokuretanomu
is to be parsed as
Kane Okure. Tanomu. (Send money, please.)
but may also be parsed as
Kane Okureta. Nomu. (Money delayed. I'll drink.)
Whether enciphered or not, telegrams without punctuation are prone to this kind of parsing errors.
This reminded me of another example of such double reading I read when I was in elementary school.
A note in a clinic:
kokodehakimonowonuidekudasai.
should be read as:
Kokode Hakimono-wo Nuide Kudasai. (Take off your shoes here.)
but may also be parsed as
Kokode-ha Kimono-wo Nuide Kudasai. (Take off your clothes here.)
Such multiple possibilities of reading tend to occur in deciphering. One such example is given in my coauthored paper, "Deciphering Mary Stuart's lost letters from 1578-1584" (Cryptologia) (note 344). When introducing a codename for a secret messenger, Mary, Queen of Scots, writes:
"Le porteur s'appellera cy a present Renous Banque" (The bearer will now be called "Renous Banque").
But this passage, known from contemporary decipherment and printed in Labanff, v, p.479, seems to be a decipherment error. It would make better sense if parsed as
"Le porteur s'appellera cy-apres entre nous Banque" (The bearer from now on will be called between us "Banque")
There is always a possibility of this kind of double reading when deciphering a ciphertext without word breaks.
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